Reflections on Dogs, Rats, Pigeons – and Cars

It’s Andy here today. Ann got up early to work on  OurLittleCorner; I can hear her humming “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

I have been around dogs for as long as I can remember and have always assumed they are pretty high up on the IQ totem pole. However, I’ve recently come across some troubling things that have challenged this assumption.

It all started when our daughter, Sara, recently sent us a link to the below Instagram video from the San Francisco Standard (fyi, although Sara is a food editor for the Standard this has nothing to do with food). It’s of a Waymo driverless car at an intersection in San Francisco.  There are tons of these cars traversing SF streets and for most locals seeing a driverless car with cameras whirling on the roof has become so commonplace that they are hardly noticed.  But to see one of these cars with a dog behind the wheel and no one else in the car is cause for a double take.  

I wondered whether or not Waymo had a policy for transporting animals without their human companions along for the ride.  The first thing I came across when looking it up was this Waymo Youtube video from 2019: “Introducing Waymo Pet – an autonomous driving technology service for pets.”

I could imagine a San Franciscan sending Tippy off solo in a Waymo to a drive-through-veterinarian service or maybe across town to an ex whose turn it is to look after Tippy. However, upon closer inspection I noticed that this video was posted on April 1. It appears that Waymo has (or had) a sense of humor. In truth, their policy posted on their official web site allows for only human-accompanied service animals.

A dog traveling in a driverless car is small potatoes when you consider that some dogs have actually been trained to drive cars on their own. An American Kennel Club post (“Meet Porter: The World’s First Driving Dog!“) tells of a New Zealand rescue group that trained three of their shelter dogs to drive specially-equipped cars. The experiment, conducted in 2012, was an effort to promote pet adoptions and show how capable and intelligent rescue dogs can be.

If dogs have the mental capacity to learn to drive a car, what about other animals? My internet search for an answer to this question quickly turned up a recent NYTimes article with a promising title: “Why So Many Cars Have Rats in Them Now.” However, this story was not about rats behind the wheel tooling around the streets of NYC; it was about the sharp increase in the number of these rodents getting under the hoods of cars and, among other things, creating havoc with the engine wiring (prompted by new soy-based insulation which is like “catnip for rodents.”)

While the street-wise NYC rats have been busy gnawing away at car engine wiring, a five-and-a-half hour drive to Rochester in upstate New York takes you to some of their rodent cousins who are not under hoods but actually driving little custom-made cars. You may have already seen these little guys on the Netflix series “The Hidden Lives of Pets” (or from one of the 1,500 news outlets worldwide that reported about them).

These rats are not just joy riding for the thrill of it; they are part of study led by Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience Kelly Lambert at the University of Rochester. She trained her lab rats to drive tiny plastic ROVs (rodent-operated vehicles) by rewarding them with Fruit Loops.  She said that her aim was to use “nonphamacological treatment approaches” that may be effective for treating depression symptoms. Her findings were published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research. I wonder if the rats appreciated their contribution to neurological science while spinning donuts with their ROVs and munching on their Fruit Loops.

Discovering that rodents can learn to drive cars as readily as dogs was a blow to my dog-centric assumptions about superior canine brain power. Could it be that the lowly rat is just as smart as our Cardigan Corgi? Of course, I had to turn to the Internet to check this out. You can imagine how shocked I was to come across this 2018 story published in the London-based Standard: “Dogs are no smarter than PIGEONS, study finds” (emphasis mine). Wow. I had to check to see if it was published on April 1. It wasn’t.

Some details about the study are posted on the Smithsonian’s web site. The research involved a rigorous content analysis of over 300 research papers dealing with various components of the cognitive ability of dogs and a host of other animals (including pigeons). The researchers concluded that the comparison species did just as well as dogs, and in some cases even better. Check out this list of animals found to be cognitively on par with or of better than dogs:

• cats
• hyenas
• chimps
• horses
• dolphins
• goats
• pigs
• raccoons
• and, as you already know, pigeons.

So, what do I make of all of this? First off, I would think that dogs would be emotionally devastated if they were to see how they stack up brain-wise against this motley collection of “comparison species” (not that I’m suggesting that dogs can read). Second, as one of the authors of the above study suggests, these findings should make us dog owners more realistic: “Dogs are dogs, and we need to take their needs and true abilities into account when considering how we treat them.”

I understand the “dogs are dogs” logic, but I still have difficulty imagining that a rodent can have the smarts of a dog (at least of our dog). And definitely, regardless of the empirical evidence, there is no way I can bring myself to accept that our smart little Corgi has the brain capacity of a pigeon. While a pigeon is pretty good at doing its “business” on a car, I sincerely doubt that a pigeon will ever be able to drive a car somewhere to do its “business.” Enough said about that.

Now that I’ve gotten this off my chest it’s time for me to go out and wash my car. Damn pigeons!